The Prime Minister is in retreat over gay marriage – but he should never have
picked the fight to begin with.

Strictly speaking, it ought not to matter what Barack Obama thinks about gay marriage. The American president doesn’t have the power to tell registrars whom they should categorise as husband or wife. Half a dozen American states have gone ahead and legalised gay marriage, and more may do so. But when the president announced this week that he is now in favour of same-sex marriage, it wasn’t about changing the law. It was all about the culture wars that define and electrify American politics, fire up voters and talk-radio shows, and have had, until recently, no real equivalent in Britain.

While gay marriage was being endorsed in the White House, it was being quietly shelved in Westminster. There was no mention of it in the Queen’s Speech; nor is there likely to be in future. Officially, the consultation is still ongoing, and the Prime Minister is enthusiastically in favour. But he has been told by his ministers and MPs that the effect on party morale has been devastating. Not so much because they care about a largely irrelevant piece of legislation that would change almost nothing in a country where gay weddings are already commonplace. The Tory troops simply feel this is an insult too far.

The rebellion has been discreet, as Conservative MPs know an elephant trap when they see one. To protest openly would conform to the caricature of Tories as a bunch of homophobic old grumps, longing for a better yesterday – and this is, anyway, not about marriage. One Cabinet member tells me that the chairman of his constituency party has threatened to resign, mainly in despair at the Coalition’s lack of economic progress. The gay marriage agenda was simply the last straw. When the same minister told the Whips that he wouldn’t vote for gay marriage, he was told not to worry, because it will never come to a vote. The climbdown has been as quiet as the rebellion.

For all their symbolic power, the gay marriage proposals would be a tiny and almost irrelevant step. In America, the battle is about the vast number of legal rights – 1,138 of them by one count – that are conferred on married couples but not those in same-sex partnerships. In Britain, the Civil Partnership Act 2004 granted all the rights of a married couple to anyone who registered for such a union. Even under the new system, the Prime Minister would have no power to tell churches, synagogues or mosques whom they could or should marry: all religious freedoms would be preserved. The battle, now, is just about a word – and about MPs who want to play at American politics.

There was something wonderfully British about the passage of the Civil Partnership Act, which was approved one rainy Tuesday evening to no fanfare at all. The contrast with the US, then just recovering from the bitter election battle between George Bush and John Kerry, could not have been more striking. There, the issue of gay marriage had divided the country from sea to shining sea. In Britain, almost nobody cared. Civil partnerships were seen, quite rightly, as ironing out a legal crinkle: it seemed common sense to grant gay couples the same rights over issues such as inheritance and hospital visiting rights.

Tony Blair, to his immense credit, did not try to declare victory over the wicked Conservatives or portray himself as the Emily Pankhurst of gay rights. The Act was presented as a technical change, not an attempt to change society or his party. David Cameron has done precisely the opposite, spinning gay marriage as proof of how much his party has changed under his leadership. “I once stood before a Conservative conference and said it shouldn’t matter whether commitment was between a man and a woman, a woman and a woman, or a man and another man. You applauded me for that,” he reminded them last year. He was milking the issue for its politics, drawing an American-style battle line and posing as a warrior.

Even the Prime Minister’s punchline – “I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative” – was an echo of a column by the American journalist, David Brooks. All of this is explosive over the other side of the pond, but just sounds odd when declaimed from a podium in Britain. Robert Mugabe occasionally rants about the number of gay ministers in the British Government, as if this were an obvious outrage, but it’s unlikely that many people in Britain know or care which ministers are gay. As with race, the country’s attitudes have changed rapidly – with no help required from the politicians.

Blair stopped short of using the word “marriage” because he thought it would be needlessly antagonistic. The Liberal Democrats had no such qualms. Last autumn, when the Coalition was dividing up the announcements for their party conferences, it was agreed that Nick Clegg could inform his troops of the gay marriage legislation. But Andrew Cooper, Cameron’s pollster, panicked, ordering the policy to be briefed to the press as a Tory announcement. He hated the idea of the Conservatives being outflanked, and wanted to be able say to young voters: “We legalised gay marriage.”

So the issue ended up with such prominence not because there was overwhelming demand for it, but because it became the centre of a custody battle between the two Coalition partners. The stakes are, as I say, laughably low. Other than introduce the M-word, the proposals would merely allow adultery to be cited as a factor in gay divorce, and confer a courtesy title on the spouse of those elevated to the House of Lords. The effects are so paltry as to be almost comical: they could and should have been passed in a tiny amendment to existing legislation without fuss. Only in Westminster could such irrelevant tweaks be compared to the American civil rights movement, as some MPs have been doing.

The Prime Minister’s mistake was not just to stir up controversy, but to look as if his sole objective was to pick a fight with his own activists. This has had the effect of crystallising concerns about his leadership in general, and making many Tory activists ask why they bother. For a while, senior Conservative strategists were quite happy about losing certain supporters, arguing that repelling the most Right-wing 20 per cent of the party would lead to a far larger increase from more mainstream voters. Well, supporters are certainly going – but they are not being replaced. Chipping Norton, the corner of Oxfordshire that has become associated with the Cameroons, fell to Labour in last week’s council elections.

If this were a real battle for equality, with a genuine goal, Cameron would probably be backed by his party. But as things stand, this just looks like a fake re-enactment of a battle won eight years ago by a Labour government that was not stupid enough to pick a fight with Britain’s churches in the process. Like so many of this Government’s mistakes, it would never have been attempted had it been properly thought through. The Tories’ sole consolation is that the Prime Minister will not be attempting such manoeuvres in the future. He is now only too aware that he needs all the votes he can get.